Canada #59 >>20994147

US Ambassador Slams Hungary For Relying On Russian Energy, But US Remains Huge Buyer Of Russian Uranium

Authored by Denes Albert via ReMix News Sunday, Jun 09, 2024

Taking his cue from Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó’s recent visit to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman used the occasion to launch yet another attack on Hungary’s conservative government.

Hungarian news and opinion portal Mandiner pointed out the duplicity of Pressman’s position, pointing out that “David Pressman does not seem to be bothered by the fact that America is also funding the Russian war along the same lines, since the uranium business between the U.S. and Russia is still going on behind the scenes.”

The U.S. passed a bill just last month banning the purchase of uranium from Russia despite the war running for over two years, and that bill will only gradually phase out these purchases over the course of years, which means the U.S. will be supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine for years to come.

Last year, RIA Novosti, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, calculated that in the first half of 2023, the United States bought no less than 416 tons of enriched uranium from Russia during the war, 2.2 times the 188 tons bought in the previous year.

Within Europe, Russian energy continues to flow to several EU countries. LNG exports to the continent ticked back up in 2024, showing an increase of 5 percent year-over-year in Q1. The biggest importers in 2023, according to DW News, were France, Spain and Belgium.

Austria has also been in the spotlight, with OMV Group contracting with Russia’s Gazprom until 2040.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron has worked hard to ensure Russian titanium sanctions never come to pass, as such sanctions will harm his own country’s domestic producers, in particular in the aeronautics industry, according to a recent Reuters report.

Notably, Hungary also has plans to phase out its reliance on Russian energy over the coming years and has already reduced its dependence. For instance, Hungary’s solar power industry is growing by leaps and bounds and now produces 18 percent of the country’s energy needs. However, Hungary faces a number of challenges that make it far more difficult than the U.S. to transition away from Russian energy — and not just due to Hungary’s geographic proximity to Russia.

For one, Hungary’s entire infrastructure is geared to process Russian oil, and switching refineries to refine other types of oil takes time and money. Secondly, Hungary lacks other sources of domestic energy that the United States has easy access to, including large deposits of natural gas, coal and oil. Even with the U.S.’s enormous natural resources and technological advantage over countries like Hungary, the U.S. still relies on Russian uranium to an enormous degree, as the U.S. has more nuclear energy plants than any nation in the world.

Finally, Hungary lacks the ports to receive large shipments of liquified natural gas from other countries without incurring large transit fees through other nations.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-ambassador-slams-hungary-relying-russian-energy-us-remains-huge-buyer-russian

>>20997011

Who would "our people" be oh Inistgator?

Dali owner hires lobbyists in Washington to quash changes to America’s Limitation on Liability Act of 1851

Sam Chambers June 7, 2024

Concerned about the immense scale of damage claims coming its way, the owner of this year’s most infamous ship has hired lobbyists in Washington to try and ensure American politicians do not tinker with the country’s liability laws.

Citing federal lobbying records, the Baltimore Sun is reporting that Grace Ocean, the Singapore-based owners of the Dali containership, have hired Blank Rome Government Relations to lobby to make sure there are no changes to the Limitation on Liability Act of 1851.

Ahead of what will be years of legal wrangling, the owner and manager of the Dali have sought to limit potential pay-outs from March 26’s Baltimore bridge allision, which killed six road maintenance workers and brought operations at the port largely to a standstill.

Grace Ocean and shipmanager Synergy Marine filed a limitation of liability court petition on April 1 seeking to cap their liability to just $43.6m, in a case that overall is expected to see pay-outs in the billions of dollars.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which released a preliminary report last month, is investigating what caused Dali to lose power, then strike and topple the bridge. The FBI has opened a criminal investigation.

The vessel, on charter to Maersk, experienced electrical blackouts about 10 hours before leaving the Port of Baltimore and again shortly before it slammed into the Francis Key Bridge, according to the NTSB’s preliminary report.

The first power outage occurred after a crewmember mistakenly closed an exhaust damper while conducting maintenance, causing one of the ship’s diesel engines to stall, investigators said. Shortly after leaving Baltimore, the ship crashed into one of the bridge’s supporting columns because another power outage, clearly captured in video footage, caused it to lose steering and propulsion.

The board said the fatal outage came about four minutes before the crash when electrical breakers unexpectedly tripped causing a loss of power to all shipboard lighting and most equipment when it was 1 km from the bridge.

The Dali crew restored power, but another blackout occurred about 320 m from the bridge, which stopped all three steering pumps. The crew was unable to move the rudder to steer.

Plans are being drawn up to get a replacement bridge up and running by 2028, while insurers have warned the Dali accident could be one of the largest marine claims in history.

After an extensive salvage operation, the port is expected to open its full main shipping channel this weekend.

https://splash247.com/dali-owner-hires-lobbyists-in-washington-to-quash-changes-to-americas-limitation-on-liability-act-of-1851/

‘If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything’

Pierre Aury June 10, 2024

The Geneva Dry 2024 conference was the occasion to hear from a number of panels about how new technologies and systems – all cloud-based, and all, of course, harnessing the endless power of AI and/or big data – could help shipping become more efficient.

And to be honest there is indeed a good case that some of these systems are certainly adding value in the at trade and post-trade parts of the trade cycle. Some of these systems can speed up and render error free some tedious and human error prone tasks.

Where the case is less convincing is for the pre-trade part of the trade cycle. One must forever be a student of one’s market. This is a good way to continuously improve the quality of trading decisions. With today’s slick, intuitive and powerful tools there is no excuse for not being such a student. But these tools should come with health warnings. These cloud-based tools are highly addictive. They tend to create a false sense of comfort being so slick and, for some of them, so intuitive that it is easy to spend endless hours indulging in data torture. The problem being, of course, as said by the 1991 Nobel prize winner in economy, Ronald H. Coase: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”

Coase received his prize for a theorem since called the Coase theorem. By the way, in order to be applicable, the Coase theorem needs the market to be efficient and competitive with transactions done at zero costs which is never the case in real life. This is reminiscent of another Nobel prize in economy, the one awarded in 1997 to Robert Merton and Myron Scholes for the development of a model to value options. The so-called Black Scholes (Fischer Black assisted both Merton and Scholes in their work) has the same problem: its underlying assumptions are never met.

Back to torturing data. Coase has a point and forgetting it can be very costly. A number of years back some traders started to arbitrage product freight routes TC2 versus TC4 whenever they deviated away from their normal good correlation only to lose millions the day they did not go back to normal. The same mistake was made in the coal freight market arbitraging synthetic freight (API2-API4) versus real freight (C4) with again millions being lost.

These new tools can create a false sense of comfort leading to blind trust but they can lead as well to analysis paralysis: the trading case is never robust enough leading to endless data torturing with no action in the end.

A final point needs to be mentioned and it is related to job protection. There is less risk booking blindly the trade recommended by one or a combination of these new tools as if it goes wrong the trader can always blame the computer whereas questioning the finds of the system and putting on a different trade in the book will see the responsibility of the trader being invoked if the trade ends up being a bad one. In order not to put his or her job at risk the trader becomes like a banker, i.e. not somebody making money in a unique way but somebody losing money the same way as the others.

Finally a word on at trade and post-trade systems which are being deployed more and more in shipping. They are now so enmeshed in customer’s organisations that it creates a huge exit barrier for the users. Maybe it is the price to pay to become more efficient.

https://splash247.com/if-you-torture-the-data-long-enough-it-will-confess-to-anything/

>>20997367

Except for your Angry Inch

>>20997440

>Will they ever come to terms with the Orders they followed & The Evil they Perpetrated on those that would not obey?

No

Their Belief System won't allow it. Government would never harm them and controls giant corporations through regulations

Lobbyists are just a very minor thing, what's a little dinner and free vacation between old friends from college?

>>20997536

Volksturm all over again

>>20997571

Here's 2018 stuff:

From bunkers to tunnels, Mafia history stirs underworld exploration in Ybor City

By Paul Guzzo Times staff Published Nov. 1, 2018

TAMPA — A real estate listing touts the features of a 2,068-square-foot home for sale on North 12th Street: Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a basement, a courtyard with Mediterranean-style shed, and beneath the shed, "its own bunker."

Welcome to Ybor City, where you find history on every corner, and sometimes — thanks to the Latin district's Mafia past — underneath them.

The home, built in the 1920s, was owned in the 1930s and 1940s by rum- and numbers-runner Jimmy Lumia. The 20-by-10-foot bunker runs as deep as 12 feet and likely is where Lumia hid his wares. The home's basement even appears to have a walled-off entrance of some kind.

"From what I understand, that led to a tunnel that led to another house," said William Crescenzo, representative for the home's owner Stephen Hickey.

Beneath Ybor City's business district lie at least three brick tunnels that have inspired a host of theories from historians — highways for the trafficking of moonshine, or numbers, or people, or maybe all three.

If you own a home in Ybor City, you never know what you'll find.

The Lumia residence is in a leafy neighborhood of bungalows and older homes about a third of a mile north of Interstate 4. The area, known as V.M. Ybor, was divided from the business district with the construction of the interstate.

Lumia worked to keep up the appearance he was the law-abiding owner of an oil company and gas stations, said mob historian Scott Deitche. But by the late 1930s, as his power grew, Lumia could no longer hide his mafia connections.

"He was considered a figure in Tampa's gambling scene and considered a key part of the Mafia power structure," Deitche said. "The FBI called him a significant player in organized crime. So, one could surmise he could use somewhere to store stuff where people could not find it."

Attorney Crescenzo said rumors of a bunker spurred the excavation of the shed's concrete floor about four years ago.

"There it was, with 12-inch-thick concrete walls," he said.

Kelly Grimsdale, who owned the home in the early 2000s, had no idea she was living on top of a hidden bunker. Still, as a longtime resident of V.M. Ybor, she quickly understood.

"There are secrets everywhere."

In the 1930s, federal investigators uncovered a bunker at 1014 10th Ave, said Del Acosta, an architectural historian.

"People stored their liquor in underground vaults," he said.

Acosta is one of the few people who have stepped inside one of Ybor City's infamous tunnels.

"I am 5-foot-8 and I could walk in it."

Another tunnel may have connected the Ybor Factory Building at 1901 N. 13th St., Tampa's first cigar factory and now a Church of Scientology site, with the El Pasaje building at 1320 E 9th Ave., later the headquarters of Radiant Oil.

"Stories are that El Pasaje had a brothel," Deitche said. "Men could go in and out without being seen by using the tunnel."

While working on the TECO Line Streetcar System in the early 2000s, crews uncovered a tunnel outside Curts Gaines Hall Jones Architects at 12th Street and Sixth Avenue. It was large enough to walk through, president Gerry Curts said, and ran about 250 feet toward the Ybor Channel before splitting in two directions.

If one of those paths stretched to the water, illicit cargo might have been unloaded from boats and carried into the city, Curts theorized.

Historian Gary Mormino said "old timers" told him the tunnels were used to traffic Chinese immigrants during a period from the 1880s through the 1920s when laws made it almost impossible for Asians to immigrate to the United States.

The building housed the bottling center for the neighboring Florida Brewing Co. while it was in business. During Prohibition, the brewery stayed open making medicinal alcohol and might have used the tunnels to smuggle booze to gangsters, said Deitche, the mob historian.

There's also a more prosaic theory behind the creation of the tunnels, said Rodney Kite-Powell, curator of the Tampa Bay History Center. The workmanship and expenditures involved suggest a public works project, Kite-Powell said — maybe drainage.

They might have been re-purposed later, he said — maybe even for legitimate business reasons.

"Everything in Ybor back then was done in cash," Kite-Powell said. "So, I can see moving cash around through those tunnels as a way to not get robbed."

More:

https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/realestate/From-bunkers-to-tunnels-Mafia-history-stirs-underworld-exploration-in-Ybor-City_173082034/

>>20997636

Yep

Wife being followed, "substance" spread by leafblowers

Just needs the cat

>>20997684

Religious "arguments" starting right on time

>>20997701

It was "Breaking" in August of 2023

>>20997720

And it will go through Graveyard, always does